The DMA’s recently released Deliverability White Paper is full of relevant and useful information for any marketer who has experienced problems reaching the inbox. In fact, it’s likely that 15% of permission-based commercial email messages in Europe are being routed to the junk, bulk or spam folders or being blocked all together, according to Return Path’s Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, 2H 2009. With more than 130 million spam messages being broadcast every day, ISPs are struggling to protect their customers’ inboxes and differentiate between the good guys (permission-based marketers like you) and the spammers. If you aren’t following best practices for inbox placement, you’ll likely get caught up in the same net as the bad guys.

 
This has a direct impact on email channel revenue and ROI, which is why marketers are increasingly starting to take notice and work with their ESPs and other solutions providers to get to the heart of the problem and improve their inbox placement rates. Solving deliverability challenges doesn’t always involve a quick fix. It can often take considerable time and resources to address the problem; however, a 95-100% inbox placement rate is achievable. In fact, Return Path has a number of clients who have managed to reach this milestone and consistently maintain it.

 
Regardless, it’s a problem not only worth addressing, but essential to long-term email marketing success. If you’re not getting delivered to the inbox, your messages won’t be opened, read, clicked or used to make a purchase or drive a desired marketing activity. Optimising deliverability is the first place any marketer should start if they want to see improved response rates and email revenue. Without a plan in place to achieve maximum inbox placement, any investment of time and resources to acquire new customers or drive incremental revenue from existing ones is wasted.

 
So what’s stopping you? Well, it’s quite common for marketers to be intimidated by the often complex technical terminology associated with deliverability issues. Terms like gateway filters, blacklists, throttling and authentication aren’t always part of a marketer’s day-to-day vocabulary.. And while it may be tempting to offload the problem to your technical team, it’s the content and frequency of the messages you’re sending that is often the main culprit behind deliverability failures. When email subscribers don’t like your email, they complain and report your message as spam to the ISPs.

 
Co-authors of the DMA white paper, Guy Hanson and Simon Bowker, do an excellent job of outlining the major factors impacting on deliverability in simple and easy to understand terms. You don’t need to be a technophile to understand the 10 steps outlined in the paper. It’s important to note that mastering the first step listed in the paper is truly the most important one: know your sender reputation. According to Return Path research, 80% of deliverability problems are caused by poor sender reputation, which is like a composite credit score for your email program. A low sender reputation is often the reason why you get stuck in the net meant for spammers. Start by focusing on making improvements to the factors that affect your reputation (primarily complaints, list hygiene and authentication) and you’ll see results in the form of increased response rates.

In this month’s issue of Infobox, Stephanie Miller addresses some of the reasons why good email gets marked as bad.  Even the most respected brands have some email message blocked by the spam filters – in fact, about 15 to 20% of permission-based, legitimate email marketing never reaches the inbox*.

The ISPs like Yahoo!, Gmail, T-Online, Orange and Free.fr now require marketers to do more to be considered “good.”

In this webinar organised by The Email Marketers Club, you’ll learn what the ISPs are saying is important for marketers if they want to get their messages delivered to the inbox.

Speaker: Stephanie Miller, VP, Global Market Development, Return Path

Moderator: Tamara Gielen, independent email marketing consultant, author of the email marketing best practices blog Be Relevant and founder of the Email Marketer’s Club

When: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 11am EST
(8am PST, 5pm CET, 4pm GMT)

The first 10 people to register using our special discount code of DMAEMAILBLOG will get to attend this webinar for free!

To find out more or to register for this webinar click here

While the date has yet to be set for the forthcoming general election, all political parties are gearing up to campaign in what promises to be the most closely contested general election in years.

As the Obama presidential campaign in 2008 showed, the difference between winning and losing could come down to which candidate operates the most effective communications campaign. A well executed digital marketing campaign undoubtedly helped to connect President Obama with voters in a way no politician has done so before.

Regular targeted and personalised emails to voters proved to be one of the most powerful communications tools in the Obama’s election campaign. It remains to be seen whether any of the UK’s mainstream political parties will harness the power of email marketing in a similar fashion, but recent history suggests they’d be foolish not to.

In this month’s Infobox Return Path’s Stephanie Miller looks at the rules of engagement when it comes to inbox placement; David Hughes of Email Academy puts forward his case for why averages don’t tell us anything interesting; Newsweaver’s Denise Cox addresses the challenges and choices around videos in email; and James Bunting of Communication explains why he’s impressed by the way Amazon uses data. For DMA members’ eyes only, this month’s special report is Anatomy of an Email Newsletter Checklist.

Why Good Email Gets Marked as Bad, Stephanie Miller

Don’t be Mr. Average: why averages are a bad, bad thing in email marketing, David Hughes

Video in email, denise Cox

Campaigns We Like: Amazon, James Bunting 

Read the entire issue

 Many years ago, I read a short story by legendary Sci-Fi author Arthur C. Clarke called “The 9 Billion Names of God.” The story revolved around an order of Tibetan monks, who had determined that there were 9 Billion possible variations on how to write the name of God and, that once this task had been completed, mankind’s reason for existence would be fulfilled.

Not surprisingly, the monks were finding that this task was taking a long time to achieve by hand. Leveraging the newly available technology of the time, they commissioned an IBM mainframe ( this was 1953 ), and 3 months later the job was done.

It was after the admittedly sceptical IBM engineers had decommissioned the computer, and were heading back down the mountain trail to the nearest airport, that they suddenly notice that “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

I was thinking of this story while I was visually inspecting a new client’s email list prior to broadcast, and starting to wonder precisely how many ways there are that people can mis-spell Hotmail ! So I ran the file through our suite of email address hygiene applications,  and the answer would seem to be close to 100 – and those are just the ones where I had at least 90% confidence that Hotmail is the domain that they were actually intended to represent.

There was “htomail.com”. And “hotamil.com”. And “homtail.com”. And “hotmali.co.uk”. And “ohtmail.com”. And . . . – the list is ( nearly ) endless. And that’s before we even start to consider the likes of “btinterent.com”, “ayhoo.co.uk”, “ntlwolrd.com”, “tisclai.co.uk”, and “gogolemail.com” ( all real examples, by the way ! ).

Sometimes these errors are made on purpose, by people who are responding to a call to action ( “give us your email address and you can download our 2 for 1 voucher” ). Consumers are increasingly savvy, and want the reward without exposing themselves to a blizzard of e-marketing activity. This could point to issues with engagement – another topic in its own right. However, these errors are more often the result of genuine errors where people either can’t type or can’t spell ( or both – as an aside, this has been recognised by the developers of www.fatfingers.com which finds mis-spelled entries on eBay such as “nitendo wee” where bid activity is – not surprisingly – much lower, so the chance of a successful bid is correspondingly higher . . . ! ).

Anyway, back to “hootmail” – oops ! While it’s ( almost ) funny, this also represents a serious problem for e-marketers. Bounce activity is one of the core metrics that feeds into the calculation of a sender’s reputation data. While the vast majority of these addresses will be filtered out after the first time that they have been broadcast to, you’ve still got to generate the bounce notifications first ! e-Marketers have traditionally dealt with this by using a separate IP address for the welcome email / first broadcast, but the increasing use of domain-based reputation means that this isn’t a perfect solution either.

Because of this, it’s starting to place a premium on making sure that the address is being captured correctly in the first place. That means using a technique such as double-entry, so that if our fat-fingered friends get it wrong the first time, it will be flagged up when they enter the address correctly ( hopefully ) the second time. Alternatively, to use a validated opt-in process that generates a confirmation email and only activates the account once the confirmation email has delivered successfully.

However, even then you are not completely out of the woods, because some of the incorrect spellings are actually valid domains, a fact that major ISPs such as Hotmail have recognised, and which they are now monitoring as a new form of spam trap. What makes this particularly difficult is the fact that these records won’t usually generate a bounce notification, so you could end up perpetuating the problem by sending to them many times over – and ending up with a mail block every time. So the only effective way of dealing with these addresses once they are on your database is to monitor your response behaviour, and screen out all non-responders on a regular basis ( which is actually part of the best practice that you should be applying anyway ! ).

However, a better way of dealing with this problem is to pre-empt it by pre-screening your data prior to broadcast. As a business, we have developed an email address hygiene routine that applies fuzzy-matching logic to test supplied domain names against known valid domain names, and to then filter out all matches where there is statistical confidence about the likelihood of the supplied domain being an incorrectly spelt version of the valid domain. The match rates aren’t massive – on average, about half of one percent – but that’s still 50 records in a list of 100,000 addresses, which based on our experience is definitely more than enough to trigger a block against you if they are not removed.

So the key learning here is that the bar for good email data hygiene is being set increasingly higher. Standard bounce management processes are certainly no longer enough – validation of email addresses at point of capture, pre-screening to remove known errors, and recency analysis of open and click behaviour are all now playing a crucial role in the delivery of successful email broadcasts. Implement them now, and the stars will continue to shine on your e-marketing program !

Whilst everyone is full of excitement around the New Year and making predictions for 2010 I’d like to take time and ponder the DMA National Client Email Marketing Report (free for DMA members) that came out late in 2009. This is the companion piece for the quarterly surveys and tracks only the clients (or the actual marketers) viewpoint rather than their technology providers.

There is much to digest in the report and I recommend it to one and all. The thing that is most interesting for me to read is the actual concerns that marketers have and they have several it seems. The specific question was worded; “Which of the following are you most concerned about?” Top of the list for both B2C and B2B marketers alike was deliverability; top of the list means the client marketer’s number one concern. That’s right, you read it correctly, the number one concern for email marketers was deliverability and that is ahead of concerns such as clicks and conversion rates.

Although it may sound obvious but simply put without deliverability, and very specifically delivery to the recipients inbox those click and conversation rates will be depressed. Indeed the ROI of the overall marketing programme will be less than it could be.

Yet deliverability remains for some a confusing term, what does it mean? Who is actually responsible? How can I reliably measure and improve upon it? What can I do to improve upon it? Wait a minute are my messages even reaching the inboxes?

Whilst I don’t plan to tackle these questions in this post, I will make some predictions on the topic of deliverability for 2010. Firstly getting messages delivered to the inbox is, for many reasons not going to get any easier. Why? Because as ISPs get better at identifying truly criminal spam, they will focus more attention on the email practices of legitimate mailers. And as they rely more on trusted whitelists and start using engagement metrics to determine if mail is actually wanted, marketers will have to work harder to achieve relevancy in the inbox by developing loyal subscribers that regularly open, click and convert. Secondly, and following on from this, monitoring email deliverability will become more important than ever for all marketers. Those who want to outperform their competitors, cut through inbox clutter and earn higher response rates will want to understand which factors drive good deliverability and demand greater insight into whether their messages actually arrived in the inbox.

The data point they will now covet is the Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) a metric that is fast becoming widespread as marketers become savvier about measuring true ROI and a metric marketers are more frequently asking their technology providers to provide in order to gain full visibility of their email marketing programme. If you are a marketer and would like to find out more, why not take our quick three question survey here.

The Daily Telegraph runs a Business Club feature every Tuesday, in a which a company presents a problem that they are currently grappling with, and a panel of experts then provides their recommendations on what steps should be taken to resolve the problem in question. The week before last’s edition was a particularly interesting one for our industry – Via-Vox ( the company behind the Powwownow conference calling solution ) has a significant issue with email deliverability. The full story can be found at :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/technology/6589059/Business-Club-Conference-call-company-Via-Vox-losing-customers-due-to-junk-email-filters.html

This is obviously a major problem for Via-Vox. It is not just a question of their marketing emails ending up in the junk folder. Even their transactional emails – vital in terms of carrying login and pin number details for an upcoming conference call – are regularly failing to deliver.

The real eye-opener for me was the responses from the “expert” panel. Some of the points that they raised ( or failed to raise ) that particularly stuck in my mind included :

• One of the panel made the statement that email deliverability is a subject that “most companies are only just waking up to.” That left me gob-smacked – I’ve been involved in email marketing for the past 10 years, and I can’t recall a time when delivery rates were not a key success metric for e-marketers.
• Not one of them touched on the subject of sender reputation. Given that a good set of sender reputation metrics now plays a role in three out of every four decisions that are taken on whether to process or reject inbound emails, all of the other recommendations that were put forward ( authentication, spam filter testing, embedded images ) – while important – are secondary. Sender reputation trumps them all in terms of importance for email deliverability.
• While all 3 members of the panel referenced the importance of email authentication, not one of them mentioned Domain Keys Identified Mail ( DKIM ) – something of an oversight given that particular importance of this form of authentication when broadcasting to BT/Yahoo! addresses.
• There was also quite a lot of focus on “spam trigger words”. In my mind, this is an increasingly irrelevant subject. Key spam filters such as Spam Assassin and Barracuda operate weighted scoring systems that will not reject an email simply because it identifies a text string as having spam-like attributes. In any case, the knowledge bases that contain these words are continually updated, so there isn’t really such a thing as a definitive list. And the chance of a transactional email containing enough spam trigger words to cause the email to be blocked is remote to say the least . . . !

I spoke to the Technical Director at Via-Vox after the article had been published, and he was in agreement, saying “we’ve already implemented most of this – they haven’t really told us anything we didn’t already know. It was a good article from a PR point of view !”

What this really flags up for me is the completely “moving goalposts” nature of the technological issues that affect the email marketing industry. Intelligence that was 100% correct 12 months ago is quickly out of date, and it is a major challenge for e-marketers to stay abreast of the key factors that ensure that their campaigns will be successful. While there is no shortage of white papers and best practice documents that are available for them to refer to, they are quickly out of date.

The DMA’s Email Marketing Council recognises this. The existing deliverability white paper ( published in 2007 ) is currently being revised by the EMC’s Legal, Data & Best Practice hub. It will be a considerably different document to its predecessor in terms of the issues that it focuses on, as will be seen when it is published in January 2010, and the intention is for it to provide its readers with common-sense, practical, and ( most importantly ) up to date guidance on how to deal effectively with the latest email deliverability obstacles.

Welcome to the November 2009 issue of Infobox. As autumn has well and truly arrived, kick back, warm your hands in the glow of your PC, sip from a mug of hot chocolate and read about the latest news and views from the world of email marketing. This month, Infobox features articles on whether or not the Royal Mail postal strikes will have a positive effect on the email sector; taking a consumer’s eye view at email marketing messages; advice on when to use the word ‘free’ in subject lines; and a review of a recent email marketing campaign that’s impressed us. For DMA members’ eyes only, this month’s special report looks at the effectiveness of using navigation bars in email templates.

Don’t forget that we’d also like to see you in the real world at the first of our four Email Customer Lifecycle seminars. On November 10, we will be addressing tactics for growing your lists with active and engaged subscribers. Tickets are going fast for this free morning seminar in central London. To guarantee your seat today, please make your booking here.

Also, now is your chance to take part in fast.MAP/DMA’s 2009 Marketing GAP study. This vital piece of research measures the gulf between what consumers think of marketing messages and what marketers think they think. Sounds confusing? Well it’s not, and if you take part then you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win £250 for your favourite charity. To start this short survey, please click here.

Our articles this month include:

Postal strike – good or bad news for email marketing? Simon Bowker

Research from my inbox…James Bunting

Free email marketing deliverability advice – when to use ‘FREE’ Chris Combemale

Campaigns we like – Firebox denise cox

Here’s the third installment of the Legal & Best Practice Hub on Metrics and their meaning. What we’re hoping is to gain your feedback and comments. This week we’re looking at Internal Monitoring and more of the metrics that feature in this area:

1. Conversion rate

Definition: Clicks on a particular link within the email divided by the total clicks.

Things to take into consideration: The number of ‘take-ups’ resulting from the e-mail activity e.g. the number of credit cards or personal loans offered as a result of the e-mail. Only includes data that is clearly based on known responses to e-mails.

2. Hard Bounce Rate

Definition: The number of hard bounces divided by the number of e-mails delivered (as a %).

Things to take into consideration: Hard bounces are e-mails which are no longer in use. These need to be removed from any future campaigns. There is no benefit in sending e-mails to an address no longer in use and there is likely to be a negative impact on deliverability.

3. Increase in Web Traffic During Effective Period of Campaign

Definition: Lift in web traffic over the established benchmark.

Things to take into consideration: It is important to monitor the number of direct visits to the website during and just after the campaign is sent to account for the individuals who do not click but enter directly into the site.

4. Link Click-through Rate

Definition: Clicks on a particular link within the email divided by the total clicks.

Things to take into consideration: This can be used to see which links are most popular with the recipients, and can be used to gauge how to further target users when sending future e-mails, and where to concentrate efforts in future campaigns.

5. Opt-out

Definition: When a recipient unsubscribes or opts-out of further communications.

6. Opt-out Rate

Definition: The number of opt-outs/unsubscribes divided by the number of e-mails delivered (as a %).

7. Refer a friend rate

Definition: The number of people who request that the email be forwarded divided by the number of emails delivered.

Things to take into consideration: Refer to DMA best practice on refer a friend. Don’t inappropriately incentivize people to forward it on. Make sure it is a one off email clearly stating why the individual has received it, giving them the option to opt in or engage with you but do not follow up if they don’t.

8. Response Rate

Definition: The number of responses including clicks, email replies, increased web traffic, store visits or call to the call centre divided by the number of emails delivered.

9. Sign-up Rate

Definition: How many people sign up to receive future communications from the company.

Things to take into consideration: It is important to make this an option that users can find easily.

10. Unique Click to Open Rate

Definition: This metric attempts to answer the question, “Of the Unique e-mail Opens, how many individuals took an action?” It is calculated as Unique Click-through over Unique e-mail Opens.

So that’s part 3. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Jonathan Burston, CACI & Legal and Best Practice Hub

A recent Return Path study shows that email sender reputation, and not content, is the major factor in whether marketing emails reach the inbox – 83% of the time, sender reputation is the cause of filtering.

That being the case, e-marketers are increasingly having to recognise the principal factors that affect sender reputation, and one of the major ones is spam complaint notifications. This represents a growing problem for legitimate email broadcasters – a typical scenario is where the email recipient knows and accepts that the email was solicited by them at some stage in the past, but now wants to be removed from the list, and can’t see any obvious way of doing so ( usually because the unsubscribe link is buried in a 6 point font somewhere in the email footer in the hope that it won’t be seen ! ). In such a situation, the spam button then becomes a convenient alternative to unsubscribing !

This represents a double-whammy for the e-marketer – in addition to losing a member from the mailing list, these notifications are fed back to the ISP that the email account is held with, which ultimately compromises the sender reputation of the sender if these notifications are received in sufficient quantities. And we are not talking big numbers here – Return Path regards complaint rate statistics of greater than 0.65% of all emails sent as indicative of “high risk” status.

However, many e-marketers are not aware of this vital metric. While a number of email service providers participate in feedback loop schemes with the major ISPs, very few of them expose this data to the campaign reporting suite. For this reason, while they will have visibility of unsubscribe requests, they will have no visibility whatsoever of spam complaint notifications, even though the driver behind these metrics is often fundamentally the same – “I want to be removed from your list”. It’s a great illustration of the old conundrum that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

That’s why e-marketers often throw up their hands in horror when we present our standard remedy to this problem, namely that the unsubscribe link should be presented somewhere highly visible, like the email header. ”But surely that will increase my unsubscribe rates ?” they ask incredulously ! It’s quite possible that it will, but if one has access to all the facts ( ie what level of spam complaint notifications are being received ), it then becomes possible to quantify the trade-off between the two.

Often, it will appear at face value to be a neutral offset, with the unsubscribe requests going up, and spam complaints going down by a similar amount. We’ve seen this ourselves – DBGi clients who have made the change have typically halved their spam complaint notifications.

In reality, such a scenario actually represents a net win because of the enhancement in sender reputation that will result from a general ISP perception of improved broadcast quality. Greater visibility of the unsubscribe link also has spin-off benefits in terms of greater credibility in the eyes of the email recipient – a case of “Wow – this sender is actually prepared to put their money where their mouth is !”

So the recommended action plan is as follows :

         i.            Get a handle on the level of spam complaint notifications that your email campaigns are generating.

       ii.            Move your unsubscribe link to a prominent position within the email.

      iii.            Benefit from improved sender reputation as complaint rates show significant reductions.

For sure – it’s counter intuitive, but the benefits are proven, and represent a quick-win improvement opportunity for e-marketers in the ongoing ( and increasingly complicated ) quest for inbox delivery.

With market conditions changing so frequently it can be difficult to keep abreast of what is happening. During my time with the DMA I have signed up to a number of blogs and e-newsletters; most days my inbox is teeming with updates and useful information.

Working in a research function my eye is naturally drawn to new studies and reports that help with our day-to-day efforts. I am also keen to promote findings to members that are relevant to their business and that serve as best practice guidelines.

One recent new study that arrived in my inbox was from Return Path, the deliverability service provider. The report, Creating Subscriber Experiences That Maximise Returns for UK Marketers, offers some very interesting findings. Unfortunately, the picture it paints of how email subscribers are treated in the UK is not pretty.

I was particularly interested in the statistics around personalisation and the use of data to target messages.  In the study, Return Path researchers found that 85 per cent of companies that collect personal data on subscribers fail to use this valuable information to make their marketing messages and offers more relevant. 

This is alarming news for the industry.  First, because segmentation and personalisation is the bread-and-butter of any direct marketing effort.  Sending generic messages when you could be sending highly targeted, relevant messages just seems counter-productive. 

Secondly, consumers in Britain are pretty sensitive on privacy issues.  That said, there are plenty of people who see the value in handing over a few personal details in exchange for messages that are more helpful and personal.  But when the result of filling out a form on a web site is a bland email message that doesn’t speak to the consumer’s needs, the value equation quickly appears lopsided.  Consumers start to wonder what the hell we marketers are doing with all this data we are collecting?

The advice that Return Path gives its clients is quite sound and aligns with the advice we give DMA members: Collect only the data you plan to use, use the data you collect. 

The other surprising statistic I found is that Return Path's researchers failed to receive a single email from 39 per cent of the organisations they registered with during the five-week study period.  Not a single email in five weeks!  In a time of global economic crisis it seems mad that companies would ignore potential customers by not following up quickly with the email messages they request.  Either companies aren’t integrating new data into their system quickly enough, or they are sending the emails as requested but are being blocked from the inbox.  Interestingly, if deliverability issues are at play here (and it seems highly likely to be the case, at least for some of these companies) then these two statistics may be linked.  Sending generic messages can often lead to high complaint rates (subscribers hitting the “this is spam” button) which can lead to ISPs blocking all the email from that sender. 

Return Path has very good advice on this as well: make sure you know where your email goes.  Blocked email can’t generate any kind of response.

Those are just two of the juiciest data points, but this report is full of interesting stats, great advice and examples of what some of the best marketers do with email. 

You can download it at the Return Path site:  http://www.returnpath.net/landing/ukstudy/